Review: Zonr

Looking for a perfect puzzle game for short snatches of time? Zonr is a rapid-fire puzzler from KlickTock, one of my favorite game devs. You might know them from Doodle Find or Little Things.

Like all of KlickTock’s games, it’s a brilliantly simple concept but it requires some genuine skill to master. The idea behind Zonr is that you’re presented with a series of boxes, all filled with Tetris-like blocks of varying shapes, and you have to pick the biggest block in each box. Get it right, and another box pops up immediately. Get it wrong, and the screen turns an angry red, urging you to try again. You have ninety seconds to get as many as you can.

Of course, like all games, the difficulty increases as you go. The game starts with a very small box with large-sized blocks inside, but the box increases and the blocks shrink as it you get more of them right. Needless to say, it’s pretty easy to play at first, but as those boxes keep coming, bam bam bam, one after another, so fast, it can send your mind spinning before you even know what’s happening. It wasn’t uncommon (in my experience) to find more than one block in a given box that was the biggest; when this happens, you just have to pick one of them for it to count.

Zonr is a free download, but you can purchase additional color and pattern themes for it in-app. Some of these themes, however, are unlocked for accomplishing various feats. Some of these are subtle, while others have colors that are rather loud. I found that the default theme brought about the best results in my reaction times, though I couldn’t help but smile at the theme based on Doodle Find, another of KlickTock’s popular games.

Smart and remarkably addictive, Zonr is a game you can enjoy solo, or challenge a friend via Game Center, Twitter, or email. It’s a universal app for iPhone and iPad. And given the amount of time you’re going to get sucked in to spending on it… you sure can’t beat the price.